Knowing whether a user of a computer has downloaded a page located on a server, or a computer, is often desired. For instance downloading information, such as a page on the internet or an intranet, may be relevant for instance a webmaster interested in knowing what pages that are considered important or relevant, a web designer interested in the attractiveness of a page in terms of its design, or a market research analyst investigating the interest of one or more pages in terms of product/service attractiveness and/or page design.
Even though there are various mechanisms available for tracking computer users' behavior, by using for instance cookies, a limitation today is the limited opportunities of finding out the what a computer user in fact finds interesting, since downloading statistics of a computer user is not identical with the actual interest of a computer user. This is at least partly based on that the cashing function of a cache memory arranged in a majority of computers.
There is a number of memories that can be operated as a cache memory. In the field of data communication networks, such as the internet or an intranet, cache memories are often used to store for instance pages, or components of pages, for instance temporary files or files earlier downloaded including pages or components of pages. In these cases, it is not unlikely that the cache memory is a part of a hard disk. The cache memory can also be a specific memory, for instance in a random access memory (RAM) type of memory.
A next time a page is to be downloaded, it, or one or more of its components, may be found in the cache memory, which leads to that downloading using the data network is not considered necessary since the information to be presented by a browser is present in the cache memory. This means that obtaining information concerning downloading behavior of computer user is limited by the function of the caching mechanisms described above. Thus, in case a computer user would visit the same page a number of times it is not unlikely that the page would be downloaded only once from a server computer, and the other times the page, or components thereof, will be read from the cache memory instead of being downloaded using the data network. This leads to difficulties when interpreting downloading statistics of pages, or components thereof, since the number of downloadings, i.e. the number of times when data has been communicated using a data network, will be correct, but the number of presentations of data will not be correct.